February 2011

Saturday, February 26, 2011

I am almost too embarrassed to even admit to this one, but I'm going to, because I believe I have just experienced the future.

My youngest son has just completed his Black History Month biography project. Each of my kids has had to do this project in fourth grade. They are to choose a famous African American, read a biography (presumably a children's version), write a one-page book report, and then create a hand puppet with which to help tell the story of the famous person in an oral report. A combination of reading, writing, oral presentation skills and art, all rolled into one project tied into a now-mandated educational month of activities.

I don’t really have any complaints about the project, except that the puppet is supposed to be created out of "home-made and assembled craft materials" which, for a non-crafty mom, is a little bit of a nightmare. But let's put that aside for the moment.

I want to focus on the biography portion of the project. We all know from our own card catalogue experiences in our youth that there are plenty of children's books about famous African Americans in history – Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, possibly even Thurgood Marshall. But what if your child wants to do a report on a famous LIVING African American, one who is in the entertainment business, one who one's parents gullibly and mistakenly listed as a potentially interesting person to research?

Friday, February 25, 2011

My kids aren't teenagers yet, but I'm already fantasizing about their first paying jobs, especially the delicious image of them following someone else's orders. This person, the first boss, will likely not care a whit about them, either on an emotional level (like a parent) or from a professional investment perspective (like a teacher). Somehow, I just can't imagine how this scenario might play out, except for a vague image of my oldest telling someone to stick it. I'm certain, however, that my kids will develop a new appreciation for their parents and teachers.

Maybe I'm just projecting from my own experience, and my kids may end up relishing their adolescent and college-years employment. But when I look back at my illustrious pre-graduate school existence, the first phrase that pops to mind is "bad jobs." From a developmental, parental perspective, however, there really is no such thing as a bad job. In other words, my kids will likely hate these jobs, but nothing will make them grow and mature quite like gritty, real-world experience.

Let's see...my early resume included stints with fast food (sub-minimum wage - $2.85 in 1985), a health food store run by the meanest hippie ever, and a post-college boss with active psychosis (including paranoid delusions). All of this, plus a string of college and graduate school temp jobs too numerous to delineate here, except for two highlights:

- Summer job at a company straight out of Mad Men– older white men occupied virtually every position of power or authority, and the few women or people of color were relegated to minor support positions. This company violated every HR regulation imaginable - for instance, all of the men, who occupied offices draped with posters of naked women, used the terms "honey," "babe," or "sweetie" when addressing any female. (Sometimes I look back and can't believe this place really existed. Perhaps it was a little time warp from the fifties that blew into 1991 like a scene from Brigadoon, then disappeared in a waft of smoke, never to return).

- A three-day assignment at an auto loan collections center. These were my responsibilities:

Step 1: Press button that starts the computer auto-dialing the telephone, in search of live people answering.

Step 2: When a live person answers, ascertain whether the name of the person answering matches the name of the person on your screen. If no, hang up. If yes, say "please hold for an important message from [Bank]."

Step 3: Press button that launches recorded deadbeat-aimed message, then try to hang up before the person launches his or her first f-you bomb.

Then, repeat. Repeat again. All day long. Performance goal: as many "live hits" as possible. The nice lady I worked with said that she'd been in this position, doing this exact work, for fifteen years.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Many of us love our gadgets. However, as with many first-world consumption patterns, they don't come free of guilt. There are ongoing questions and challenges regarding the environmental impact of manufacturing computers and electronic gadgetry. And there are also concerns about the sheer amount of energy required to power these wonderful Intarwebz and all the geegaws connected to them. There's a reason big companies like to place datacenters near rivers (hint: hydroelectric power).

So, while we can all feel a smidge of anxiety knowing that every Google search we do and every email we send kinda' sorta' maybe sends a little puff of carbon dioxide into an atmosphere, that, in the immortal words of engineer Montgomery Scott CANNA TAKE MUCH MORE OF THIS, CAP'n, another guilt-inducer is labor. Specifically, the labor practices used in the places that manufacture our pretty, pretty iPads.

Mike Daisey is an amazing monologuist, story teller, and solo performer. Last year I saw his show "The Last Cargo Cult" at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in D.C. and it was amazing. I have been remiss all these years in not seeing his earlier work. I also read the book he wrote about working at Amazon in the 90s called 21 Dog Years: A Cube Dweller's Tale. His most recent effort is a show called "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." Here's a snippet of a review:

In this freewheeling theatrical essay, he doesn't just hold Apple CEO Steve Jobs' feet to the fire. He doesn't just question the morality of capitalism. He forces theatergoers to take a hard look at the glowing screens in their pockets and ask where they came from and at what cost.

Only a true believer, a man who fieldstrips his MacBook Pro down to its 43 components parts to unwind, could be this shocked and heartbroken to find that the gadgets he adores, those glossy pieces of electronic sculpture known as the iPad and the iPhone, might have been produced under brutal working conditions in China. Eager to investigate for himself, Daisey traveled to Shenzhen, a city of 14 million people crammed together under a "poisoned silver sky," at a time when workers were hurling themselves off the roof at Foxconn, one of Apple's key manufacturers.

Monday, February 21, 2011

It's nearly impossible to escape the news coverage as protests rage from Madison to Morocco. But there is another revolt that's been taking place for much longer. And happening much closer to home.

To be precise, it's been happening in my home. At first the protests were peaceful. If a kid tried a food he or she didn't like, the response was to merely spit it out. Now, their fists are up and my Swiffer is out. If I present something they don't like the looks of, it ends up on the floor. No taste required.

Since I can't respond with water cannons and it doesn’t matter yet if I shut down the internet, I've resorted to trickery. While I've had some success, I can't say that I've put down the insurrection. It's still a major challenge to get anything green past them. Or pasta that's not macaroni. Or rice.

Given these facts, I am not quite clear why I thought they would like barley risotto. Perhaps I was beginning to crack, as Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak did at the end, letting my pride and delusions of grandeur get in the way of reality. With one ear open to the television reporting one protest movement after another, I went to work in the kitchen.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Mompreneurs have it made: they have a career, a family and they manage to keep everything perfectly in sync.

Well, not really. Olympic gold medalist Gigi Fernandez knows how it difficult it is. Since the age of three, Fernandez yearned to play the sport she loved most, tennis. Even though her parents knew she had a talent for tennis, her eye and hand coordination skills were very good, her parents resisted her begging for lessons until age 7.

Path to the Olympics

Never feeling forced to love the sport, Fernandez says she saw playing as the greatest time. "I was having fun; I was hitting against the wall when I was three and started taking lessons at 7, both my parents were players and when they went to play, I would watch and play."

Fast forward to the 1992 Olympics and Fernandez became the first Puerto Rican female to win a gold medal. She won gold again in 1996. Her ambitions didn't end there, however.